Thursday, January 28, 2016

Stories around the net plus rants

All I can say is "politics uggh"...
I know from my experience that when you live overseas, you don't really understand the US elections, which always look crazy since the press tends to exaggerate the crazy part and demonize the non PC opinions.

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a reminder that in the 19th century, (and in some parts of Europe in the 20th century) that Europe had third world type poverty: the bodies of 800 children under age 6 found in an abandoned church cemetery.
Found when constructing a road.
Archeoblog comments:

Actually, the kids ought to show abundant evidence of the sorts of chronic diseases that affect (and kill) children, such as malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies. Those may not be the proximate causes of death (usually infections) but they are contributing factors.

The dirty little secret of history is that young kids died a lot...Sort of like today in parts of Africa and asia. LINK.

yes, like all the kids who died in our hospital when I worked in Africa...which is why one of our "preventive medicine" outreaches was a nutrition village: We had local health aids screen kids getting thin, and then arranged a six week course in nutrition/chicken (egg) and veggie raising for mom while we fed up the kids.

once the kid got kwashiorkor, they usually died...and many borderline cases died of infectious disease: Measles is a big cause of death in the malnourished, and often the borderline children who got measles would morph into full kwashiorkor and die a few weeks later, after surviving measles.

We had some experts say we should just not give out the (expensive) vaccine, because it was nature's way of culling the weaker kids who would grow up stunted in mind and body if they lived.

Eugenics is alive and well: but they will only whisper such stuff in private, for fear of being called racists.

of course, nowadays the problem is the anti vaccine hysteria, usually by the elite celebrities who had never seen an epidemic....and alas often it is picked up by less educated local clergy, who point to an article in the western press to tell their people not to let their kids get the shots.

of course in the USA, he would just have borrowed his mom's car and driven there.

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I have a relative who keeps telling me that the trade center attack was an inside job. The latest is that the repeat "explosions" seen as the towers collapsed pancake fashion "proved" they set explosives every few floors to do this.

No, he has no engineering background, and he never read the PopMech report that gives engineering details, and he probably doesn't realize that Rick Rescorla was on the lookout for such things...

Yes, I follow "conspiracy theories": Because some of them have a grain of truth in them. The problem is they exaggerate that small truth as if it was entirely true, ignoring other factors e.g the risk benefit ratio for example, where they trumpet the risk but ignore the much much larger benefit.

But now Oxford university does a study that sort of proves that huge conspiracies are hard to do: because few people can keep their mouths shut.

Oxford University physicist Dr David Grimes worked out a mathematical way to calculate the chances of a plot being deliberately leaked by a whistle-blower or accidentally uncovered.
He was able to show that the more people share in a conspiracy, the shorter its lifespan is likely to be...

For a plot to last five years, the maximum number of plotters turned out to be 2,521. To keep a scheme operating undetected for more than a decade, fewer than 1,000 people could be involved, while a century-long deception had to include fewer than 125 collaborators.

the moon hoax would have required 400 thousand plus conspirators...

and sorry, global warming deniers, that conspiracy has hundreds of thousands of conspirators, and would be found out even faster.

Of course, the problem is not global warming per se, but that the hysteria is being used to push a one world tyranny on us.

But then, just because people with an interest in helping mankind meet, it does not mean they are doing so because they are evil, and it doesn't mean that they all agree: this is true for the bilderbergers or for Catholic bishops.

Maybe the answer is to have CSPAN show the Davos etc meetings on TV, like EWTN shows the clueless Catholic bishop meetings in the USA...

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speaking of vaccine: One of the side issues with the MMR vaccine that is rarely discussed: The it's use has pretty well eliminated congenital rubella syndrome in developed countries. MMR=Measles, mumps and Rubella (aka "german" measles).

Yes, rubella was once a major cause of deafness, blindness, and mental retardation, often with "autistic" like symptoms, in the "good old days"...

indeed, one reason docs backed loosening of the abortion laws in the 1960's was after we saw these kids born after their mom got rubella when pregnant, but couldn't get an abortion, and were left with a severely affected child.